At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I’m just going to jot some notes down on this topic. This isn’t intended to be a revelation, but just some thinking.
Many of us think of time as a linear concept – something that is a continuous line, where no point can be “returned” to from the future. Turning back time, to return to a previous era or way of thinking is not possible – both literally and figuratively; there is no way to undo the effects of the present on the future. There are other conceptions of time, but for the sake of this argument, I’m going to be relying on this view.
So much of our politics seems to be focused on “correction of the past.” Particularly the view that whatever the previous administration had done can be undone, returning us to the stasis of a previous, near-past era that was “better.” In the case of Trump, it means undoing the world trade order, undoing the Obama era foreign policy agreements, undoing envrironmental regulation and so on. In the case of Obama, it was undoing the wars and conflicts, repairing relationships with allies, returning our economy (such as it was) to strength. But much of what is proposed depicted as an undoing of what previously existed in the recent past – a response to a president and a set of policies that were disliked by one constituency in the United States.
What is so often absent is a vision for what a new future would look like. And since a new future is truly all that we can have (we cannot go back into the past), politics that focus on settling grievances of the past will never inspire a long term change in an evenly divided country. If we focus on settling scores and righting wrongs of the recent past, we will forever be interlocked in stark contrasts and harsh disagreements, framed in the feelings of the recent past, characterized by the neverending score-settling we’re all very familiar with.
A coherent vision that takes us out of the recent past and into the future is one that corresponds with the reality of physics and will pull us out of our deadlocked political zeitgeist.
